Communication traffic in today's Ethernet computer communication networks, including local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs), are predominantly occupied by Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) packets. TCP/IP transport relies on a sophisticated retransmit algorithm of TCP/IP packets in the network to handle dropped TCP/IP packets that were transmitted but never acknowledged as being received. However, retransmitted TCP/IP packets lead to poor network utilization (lower bandwidth efficiency) and higher latencies.
While packet drops are commonplace in a WAN, packet drops can also occur in a LAN within a data center due to an increasing level of inter-server packet traffic between servers within the data center (e.g., east-west traffic). The inter-server packet traffic can be so high that it sometimes overflows the data buffers of the data center's switches and routers within the LAN. Accordingly, the switches and routers will drop packets for TCP/IP packet traffic.
Furthermore, dropped data packets can occur at receiving servers within a data center that are receiving a transmission of data packets from a sending server. For some reason, the receiving server cannot process or store the received data packets at the transmission rate of the sending server. Dropped packets by the receiving server can further lead to poor network utilization of the network and added network latency between servers.